And they’re off

So it looks like there’s going to  be a European Parliamentary election, and people are publishing polls, the table below shows the number of seats in 2014 and the 1st Quota. Last time’s results are reported by the House of Commons Library here ….

Last time in London Labour won 4 seats, the 1st, 3rd, 5th & 7th on the back of a 36% vote share. With the right manifesto we might do better. The Greens got the last seat with 8.9% of the vote. (The last seat is always intresting, because there are still wasted votes in a D’Hondt count. …

Counting

I am considering some issues relating to the conduct of elections in the UK. In Lewisham Labour we are selecting a candidate for Mayor and the election will be conducted using a simple eliminating ballot, sometimes referred to as an Alternative Voting scheme. This, it can be argued is a special case of a more proportionate voting system; the special nature being that there is only one winner and thus the result is not so proportionate. The rest of this article is a technical description of an alternative vote election, a single transferable vote election and a closed list proportional representation election using the D’Hondt counting system. …